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Fair Usage

If language were set in concrete, there would be no call for new books on how to use it. These days, most such books are at pains not to seem prescriptive. In 1996, Patricia T. O’Conner gave us the admirably entitled “Woe Is I,” aptly subtitled “The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.” In this lucid and sensible book she criticized the use of “hopefully” to mean “It is hoped” or “I hope”: “Join the crowd and abuse ‘hopefully’ if you want; I can’t stop you. But maybe if enough of us preserve the original meaning it can be saved. One can only hope.”

Now, in “Origins of the Specious,” she says, “I’m not hopeful about convincing all the fuddy-duddies out there, but here goes: It’s hopeless to resist the evolution of ‘hopefully.’ ” So use it, she says. “Hopefully, the critics will come to their senses.”

According to how you look at it, O’Con­ner has turned on her fellow preservationists (“fuddy-duddies,” is it?), or she has evolved along with the language. In “Woe Is I,” she took a hard line on the difference between “disinterested” and “uninterested.” Now she says the one, generally speaking, means the other, because “as we all know, in English the majority rules. All those usage experts will eventually come around. . . . You can take a stand, use ‘disinterested’ to mean not interested, and risk being thought an illiterate nincompoop by those who don’t know any better.” You’ll note that “those who don’t know any better,” here, are the “usage experts.” That is a bit much, coming from someone who is widely regarded as a usage expert. O’Conner goes on, however, to offer characteristically good advice, which is to finesse the issue (that is, to avoid confusion) by using “impartial” instead of “disinterested” and “not interested” instead of “uninterested.”

But enough about her. I say that only because in this new book, O’Conner, a former editor at the Book Review, and her husband, Stewart Kellerman, are co-authors who express themselves corporately as “I.” They explain in an authors’ note: “Two people wrote this book, but it’s been our experience that two people can’t talk at the same time — at least not on the page. So we’ve chosen to write ‘Origins of the Specious’ in one voice and from Pat’s point of view.”

“Origins of the Specious” adeptly demolishes plausible but insupportable etymologies of “brassiere” (a garment whose inventor was not named Titzling), “rule of thumb” (nothing to do with wife beating) and other obliquely derived phrases and words. Which is not to say that the couple a k a “I” are beyond reproach.

“I was a philosophy major in college,” write Pat and Stewart (if I may be so bold), “so I have no excuse if I mess this up.” Well, she/they does/do. The issue is “begs the question.” The authors deftly lay out this expression’s history and its traditional, logical definition: “taking for granted what you’re trying to prove.” But they go on to say, “English speakers have treated ‘beg the question’ illogically for more than a century and a half,” which is no doubt true enough — but the authors’ example, from Henry Adams, is quite consistent with the traditional meaning. The expression has been used, they write, “to mean avoiding, raising or dismissing a question, as well as prompting a different one.” They thereby miss a chance to frame the contemporary usage issue more distinctly. Currently, “begging the question” almost always means, O.K., “prompting a different” question — but prompting with an urgency derived less from cogency than from the word “beg.” Chicagotribune.com recently carried a far-fetched controversy over the decision of another newspaper’s magazine section to run a cover photograph of an inter­racial couple kissing. “It’s as if the couple is begging for attention,” one posting contended about public displays of interracial affection. “Which begs the question of how real their affections were.” The traditional usage of “beg the question” was analytic, probative. The current one lends itself to special pleading.

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Illustration by Jesse Gordon

English, we are reminded in “Origins of the Specious,” is not “as logical as, say, Fortran or Cobol, or even Esperanto.” Segue to Arika Okrent’s fascinating “In the Land of Invented Languages.”

Shouldn’t language be rational, foolproof, universal? Many people, in the passionate belief that it should be, have concocted alternative, ideal-in-principle tongues. Okrent lists 500 manufactured languages, dating back to Lingua Ignota (around A.D. 1150) and including Universalis Nyelvnek (1820), Ixessoire (1879), Ro (1908) and Prjotrunn (2006). Of the 500, the two spoken by the most people today are Esperanto and Klingon. (Modern Hebrew isn’t exactly invented; it revives and expands an existing liturgical and literary language that had functioned as a marketplace lingua franca.) Okrent, though no Trekkie, has gone so far as to make herself vocally proficient in Klingon, which was developed, and is still overseen, by the linguist Marc Okrand for the extraterrestrial world of “Star Trek.”

The author — who, according to the jacket copy, has “a joint Ph.D. in the department of linguistics and the department of psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuro­science Program at the University of Chicago” — examines a variety of would-be languages and related philosophical tenets (there are no pure ideas, all signs depend on conventions) in a rigorously linguistical way. And yet her book is a pleasure to read. It shows how language systems connect, or don’t connect, with people.

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The most interesting character she turns up is Karl Kasiel Blitz, who changed his name, for connotative reasons, to Charles Bliss and set out to invent “a better, simpler system of pictorial symbols, ‘a logical writing for an illogical world.’ ” In the 1940s he created Blissymbolics, which failed to transform human understanding but did prove a godsend — as a gateway to English — for children so impaired by cerebral palsy that they couldn’t speak.

Over Bliss’s symbols hovered Bliss himself. Of his desire to realize substantial income from his decades of work, Okrent is rather less understanding than she might be. But she makes it clear that Bliss, personally, was no bargain. He was ecstatic when a rehabilitation center in Toronto recognized Blissymbolics’ therapeutic usefulness — indeed, he offered its speech therapist his hand in marriage. But when the center applied his language too loosely, by his standards, he flew into tirades.

“The more successful the program became, the more Bliss complained. . . . He was outraged that in one of their textbooks, they showed his symbol for vegetable . . . next to a picture of various vegetables, including tomatoes. They had totally misunderstood his system! This was the symbol for things you eat (mouth symbol) that grow underground! Tomatoes don’t grow underground!”

To catch on, Okrent concludes, a language must be useful to some particular culture. A popular presentation at the 2007 Language Creation Conference, she reports, was given by a librarian whose “language, Dritok, was born when he began to wonder if it was possible to make a language out of chipmunk noises. . . . The examples he gave sent waves of glee through the audience — they sounded so strange, so inhuman, but there was a detectable structure or system that gave Dritok a scent of ‘languageness.’ He had also worked out aspects of a cultural context. . . . Dritok is the language of the Drushek, long-tailed beings with large ears and no vocal cords.”

Speakers of Esperanto are brought together by visions of world harmony. Speakers of Klingon have in common that they “are enjoying themselves. They are doing language for language’s sake, art for art’s sake. And like all committed artists, they will do their thing, critics be damned.” Klingon’s grammatical rules are flexible. “The language is just messy enough to be credible.”